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This masterclass examines how customer-centric marketing, using new perspectives developed by Clayton Christensen and others, can guide new product and service innovation. Christensen’s Jobs Theory revolves around the observation that “customers don’t buy products or services,” but rather “pull them into their lives to make progress” in some way that is particularly valuable to them.”

Two recent books are discussed in detail– Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice (2016), by Christensen and co-authors Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David Duncan and Sense & Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously (2017) by design and innovation experts, Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden

In coming to view innovation through the lens of Jobs Theory, what you see is not so much the customer at the center of the innovation universe, but “the customer’s Job to Be Done,”which “may seem like a small distinction, but, in reality, “it changes everything.”

Identifying a well-defined Job to Be Done offers a kind of innovation blueprint which is different’ from the traditional marketing concept of “needs” because of the ‘much higher degree of specificity required to identify precisely what it is you are trying to solve for in particular use-case contexts.

When applied astutely, the concept of “Job to Be Done”can improve a company’s track record at new product or service introduction. For the first time it gives managers and other corporate leaders a guidebook for making innovation initiatives more likely to be successful.

This paper aims to deepen the current knowledge of seasonality by investigating visitors’ intentional and behavioural patterns during peak and off-peak seasons. It compares the variation in several key behavioural factors, namely, duration of stay, party size, revisit intention, spending and breakdown of spending in different sectors in hospitality and tourism including entertainment, restaurant, accommodation and transportation. Moreover, this research expands the understanding by examining the effectiveness of two innovative strategies of offering a digital app and organising a unique event to tackle seasonal imbalances through stimulating visitors’ intention to change their timing of visit from peak to off-peak periods.

The author initially used a Delphi approach to gather experts’ opinion on the two scenario settings: event organisation and a trip planner app. The scenarios aimed to potentially encourage visitors to change their visit time to off-peak seasons. Then, using a quantitative survey, the travel habits and spending behaviours of 310 participants were captured. Furthermore, the survey assessed their intention to travel during off-peak seasons in response to the implementation of the two innovative strategies.

The results revealed that although the number of visitors who travel in off-peak seasons may be lower, their daily spending is higher than peak season visitors. In addition to total spending per day, the duration of stay, part size, quality of accommodation and re-visit intention of visitors indicated significant variation between peak and off-peak seasons. According to the statistical analysis’ results, organising events (including festivals) proves more effective in encouraging visitors to travel during off-peak seasons compared to digital innovation (i.e. a trip planner app). This finding is in line with the tenets of the Jobs-to-be-Done Theory of innovation.

This study contributes by conceptualising the mechanism of seasonality and its impacts on subsectors of tourism and hospitality. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is one of the few empirical research that compares the behavioural patterns of visitors including their average spending per day between peak and off-peak seasons. Previous studies focused on specific regions or sectors, whereas this research investigates visitors’ behaviour on a broader scale to provide more comprehensive view. Furthermore, this study is novel due to practising an outside-in approach through investigating the effectiveness of the two innovative strategies aimed at addressing seasonality in the hospitality and tourism industry from visitors’ point of view.

The aim of the paper is to test and demonstrate the potential benefits in applying reinforcement learning instead of traditional methods to optimize the content of a company's mobile application to best help travellers finding their ideal flights. To this end, two approaches were considered and compared via simulation: standard randomized experiments or A/B testing and multi-armed bandits.

The simulation of the two approaches to optimize the content of its mobile application and, consequently, increase flights conversions is illustrated as applied by Skyscanner, using R software.

The first results are about the comparison between the two approaches – A/B testing and multi-armed bandits – to identify the best one to achieve better results for the company. The second one is to gain experiences and suggestion in the application of the two approaches useful for other industries/companies.

The case study demonstrated, via simulation, the potential benefits to apply the reinforcement learning in a company. Finally, the multi-armed bandit was implemented in the company, but the period of the available data was limited, and due to its strategic relevance, the company cannot show all the findings.

The right algorithm can change according to the situation and industry but would bring great benefits to the company's ability to surface content that is more relevant to users and help improving the experience for travellers. The study shows how to manage complexity and data to achieve good results.

The paper describes the approach used by an European leading company operating in the travel sector in understanding how to adapt reinforcement learning to its strategic goals. It presents a real case study and the simulation of the application of A/B testing and multi-armed bandit in Skyscanner; moreover, it highlights practical suggestion useful to other companies.

In demand-driven markets, customer value, sometimes called perceived use value or consumer surplus, is defined by the customer rather than the firm. The value a firm can appropriate, its profits, is driven by the customer’s willingness to pay for the value they receive, adjusted by costs. This paper introduces a conceptual framework that helps understand value creation and appropriation in demand-driven markets and shows how to influence them through strategic decision-making.

This paper uses an axiomatic approach combined with an extended analytical formulation of the jobs-to-be-done framework to contextualise demand-driven markets. It mathematically derives implications for managerial decision-making concerning selecting customer segments, optimising customer value creation and maximising firm value appropriation in a competitive environment.

Rooting strategic decision-making in the jobs-to-be-done framework allows distinguishing between what customers want to achieve (goal), what product attributes need to be satisfied (opportunity space/constraints) and what value creation criteria related to features are important (utility function). This paper shows that starting from a job-to-be-done, the problem of identifying which customer segments to serve, what product to offer and what price to charge, can be formulated as an optimisation problem that simultaneously (rather than sequentially) solves for the three decision variables, customer segments, product features and price, by maximising the value that a firm can appropriate, subject to maximising customer value creation and constrained by the competitive environment.

Applying the derived results to simultaneously deciding which customer segments to target, what product features to offer and what price to charge, given a set of competing products, allows managers to increase their chances of winning the competitive game.

This paper shows that starting from a job-to-be-done and simultaneously focusing on customers, product features, price and competitors enhances firm profitability. Strategic decision-making is formulated as an optimisation problem based on an axiomatic approach contextualising demand-driven markets.

There is a significant pressure on consulting businesses to produce innovative solutions and to assist their clients in producing innovative solutions for their organizational problems as well. In addition to that challenging need to innovate for survival and competition, as other contemporary firms, consultancies must face the global changes brought by the outbreak of the coronavirus infection since 2019. This qualitative pilot study aimed at exploring the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on the approaches to innovation in the consulting industry.

Triggered from the literature gap on approaches to innovation in consultancies during the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, a grounded theory approach was used to generate a theoretical explanation of how the COVID-19 is affecting the strategies and approaches of businesses in harnessing innovation opportunities from the perspectives of four professionals from an information technology (IT) consultancy in the USA.

The findings of this pilot study showed that organizational leaders' increased responsiveness, a Job-To-Be-Done strategy, organizational support and team adaption are the keys to harvesting dynamic capabilities for better competition, even during global environmental changes.

This implies that managers remain the main actors in a firm's efforts to harvest dynamic capabilities. Innovation strategists, business leaders and policymakers can confidently work together to implement novel and flexible work settings that integrate both social and economic advancements.

Theoretical implications support the sustainable innovation strategy concepts and the Job-To-Be-Done theory. Finally, the substantive theory from this pilot study lays the ground for future research on approaches to innovation in the consulting industry.

The purpose of this paper is to satisfy a clear gap in the main field of open innovation research whereabouts a very little scholarship try to analyze the mechanisms of innovative milieu down smart cities environments by applying through innovative projects that seem to support efficiently the entry of private firms and citizens in public collaborations.

The research performed an exploratory and qualitative evaluation based on the case study method built on the evaluation of organizational behavior and urban boosting innovation through smart city initiatives. In doing so, after a literature review in smart city as well in lean methodology fields, the case of Turin Smart City follows.

As acknowledged by international literature, the paper shows how a lean approach enables local government to define and realize smart projects and initiatives in a faster and more effective way. Particularly, the government in one of the main cities in Italy, id est Turin, combines a lean methodology with the job-to-be done approach, according a new concept of smart initiatives involving a startup mentality for the lead users which enables interesting predictions relating the human aspects of open collaborations.

The specificity of this inquiry highlights valuable insights from double-gate smart cities’ innovation, social and urban as well. The research is largely interpretative and exploratory and while this provides a solid scientific foundation for further research, it does not, itself, subject any hypothesis to statistical testing and validation.

Since the city approached the smart city subject in a lean way, it was able to realize some projects in a faster way. Through specific initiatives, the city acquires the ability to involve more and better all its stakeholders such as citizens, companies, and public employees, among others. In this regard, the paper invigorates managerial debates concerning the urban and social aspects of open innovation ecosystems which represent in our minds a superior level of open innovation, testbeds of positive knowledge, and stimulus of knowledge dissemination process around the city.

Describes how Agile teams can use strategic management tools and processes to discover market-creating innovations.

The related article “The next frontier for Agile: strategic management” in the previous issue of Strategy & Leadership explored the theory and possibilities of enterprise-wide Strategic Agility, a combination of Agile mindset and processes with strategic management theory to produce continuous market-creating innovation. This second installment offers insights from noted practitioners about implementing it.

The strategic concepts of Kim & Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy, Clayton Christensen’s Job to Be Done theory and Curt Carlson’s SRI Playbook – Need, Approach, Benefits per costs and Competition (NABC) can be adopted by Agile teams seeking innovations that create new customer value.

Identifying a well-defined Job to Be Done produces the start of an innovation blueprint which is unlike the traditional marketing concept of “needs” because of the much higher degree of specificity required to identify precisely what problem your potential solution would address.

Using strategic management concepts, Agile teams can redefine how needs are being met and in the process, discover value for customers from offering something or doing something that the company or the industry currently doesn’t provide.

While some large organizations are preoccupied with mastering operational Agility as a way to upgrade existing products and services, they and the wider management community need to realize that the main financial benefits from Agile management will flow from the next frontier: achieving Strategic Agility, a market-making approach to innovation.

The author proposes that firms adopt Agile management as a way to promote market-creating innovations through a process of imagining and delivering something that unexpectedly delights whole new groups of customers, once they realize the possibilities.

The potential of the Agile approach to innovation is that it can revitalize mature companies by discovering new customer experiences and create products and services that fulfill unmet needs.

This article shows how Agile management and strategic management concepts like “Jobs to be done” theory and “Blue Ocean” strategy can merge to promote market-creating innovation.

Given that industry borders are dissolving and competition is more dynamic than ever, the need for Strategic Agility – speedy, customer focused innovation that aims to make markets–is becoming increasingly obvious. This confluence of Agile and strategic management is a new and exciting approach to innovation.

Companies and organizations use various innovation governance structures, processes and metrics to make decisions about allocation of resources to the development of an innovative idea. Although many metrics measuring the process of innovation and the performance of the enterprise have been developed, a fundamentally solid and complete metric speaking to the quality and viability of the innovative idea itself is lacking. The business, applied innovation, creativity, unmet user needs and problem-solving (BACUP) model of innovation quality is proposed as such a metric based on viewing innovation from the five different viewpoints mentioned in its definition. BACUP is shown to facilitate discussion and analysis in innovation theory and is proposed as a tool allowing any innovation governance structure to achieve innovation assurance by mitigating risk and uncertainty and maximizing an innovation’s chance for success.

The BACUP framework was inspired by researching definitions of innovation and coming upon a survey in which different definitions were obtained from several different roles in companies and organizations. To use BACUP as a metric, the author and research assistants made qualitative judgments about innovations. Several judgments were obtained independently and consensus was plotted on the BACUP graphs.

BACUP can be used to illustrate and discuss major concepts in innovation theory. BACUP can be used to compare the relative viability of different innovative ideas. BACUP can be used to detect vulnerabilities in innovative ideas and provide information to innovation management and governance so that corrective measures can be taken. BACUP can be extended by other researchers and practitioners.

In its current form, BACUP is not a quantitative tool; however, the authors envision other researchers applying existing quantitative tools and incorporating them into the BACUP framework.

BACUP is an innovative idea quality metric employable in any existing innovation management/governance structure or methodology. BACUP also gives practitioners a way to engineer innovative ideas into successful innovations.

BACUP can lead to predictable and repeatable improved innovation outcomes, resulting in superior solutions to problems in all domains.

The BACUP framework is a novel, multi-dimensional view of innovation. Application of BACUP as a metric yields a new type of capability for innovation governance called innovation assurance.